As I previously mentioned here, tonight is the opening night of The Saturday Morning Pajama Jam (showing at midnight on fridays)

The show is a "block" of saturday morning-esque programming. The block is made up of 4 individual shows each about 15 minutes long. Starting with:

1) Our Land of the Lost ripoff "Captured!" is about 5 improvisors who were riffing so hard one day that they opened a rift in the space-time continuum.
2) Next is the improvised murder mystery cartoon we call Murder She Animated.
3) Watch science and nature come to life on Science is Awesome with Chickenhand the Pirate.
4) Puppets running a restaurant?... only in the situational comedy Serving Up Danger!

All that for $5! Also if we can swing it, free Mimosas! Bring a blanket and curl up with us! We'll be drunk, and also acting!

Staring tonight Friday 25th at Midnight in the Top Shelf at Dad's Garage. The show will run the next 4 fridays.

also, I've got a Noot d' Noot crew update. The DJ Dookie Platters party was covered by Andisheh in his Scene and Herd column. I'm almost convinced that my dead beat group of friends aren't so bad after all.

My bosses have been kind enough to let me attend the Philadelphia Film Festival to speak on behalf of Sealab.

Of the seven guys that make Sealab my bosses narrowed the field down to four of us who would be eligible to go. How did they make their final decision? We faced off in a single death match game of Call of Duty: United Offensive. First player to get 50 kills goes to Philly. It was a close match, very evenly matched right up until the end.

If you live in or near Philly, come out to the Festival April 8th - 10th. I'll be there... somewhere. Now I just need to take some public speaking courses, and invest in some index cards.

If you have a problem,
and if you can post a funny ad to craigslist
then maybe you can find...

The Real A-Team. (via linkfilter)

Sat night was spent at Mulligan's, our favorite neighborhood bar. The kaleidoscope crew does all it's bar type stuff there. Including but not limited to trivia, drinking and riding your bike home (leg scrapes to prove it), and eating bar food that is terribly bad for you. Even if you are a robot. As it turns out, Mulligans was mentioned in an AP newswire piece that made the rounds on the internet. The bar serves a dish called "The Hamdog" which seems to be the centre of all the press. Long story short, The Hamdog "is a hot dog wrapped by a beef patty that's deep fried, covered with chili, cheese and onions and served on a hoagie bun. Oh yeah, it's also topped with a fried egg and two fistfuls of fries."

but you can find out more about that in any number of livejournal entries. That is not what this post is about. This post is about DJ Dookie Platters and the Noot d' Noot crew. (Now this is the part of the post where I could make fun DJ DP's name, but I pretend to be a robot on the internet... so you know... grain of salt and all. Besides, it's a funny name, and those guys don't take themselves seriously at all.) Mulligan's let them throw a dance party. DJ Dookie P set up his turntables and spun all kinds of old school hip hop, reggae, some punk rock. It was low-fi and laid back, great fun.

We took our friend Andy, he tried to get a picture of the Hamdog for a possible mention in our local free newspaper, a paper he writes a couple of columns for. But Mulligan's blew it. Their "deep fryer was down." How does a giant vat of heated oil go down? "Come back tomorrow" they said... Yeah, hold the presses for Mulligan's. But such is the charm of our little neighborhood bar. They kind of half-ass everything.

During the dance party I found out (via a "shoutout") that the guy doing the My Street Gang is #1 tag was "in the house." I've seen his tag up around Oakhurst recently. As it turns out, we are currently facing off in an old-timey Turf War. (see photo below) The Kaleidoscope Crew is going to the matresses, gearing up for war, Pro Wrestling Style. So watch out.

Previously mentioned here

"You go to your 9 to 5 jobs and you complain about the pizza being late... There's no way you're gonna know how we live here."

you're right...
The story of the 2/3 Field Artillery, aka the "Gunner" Battalion.
Gunner Palace in theaters March 4th.

We shot a commercial today for new episodes of Sealab 2021. Sadly, this WILL eventually be on television.

Friend and co-worker Mack got me motivated. He's been using his Flickr account most effectively. And here I've gotten out of the habit of taking photographs.

Armed with my Fuji Finepix 3800 and print out of my photographers rights, I venture out into this world to once again photograph it. Please don't arrest me for it.

Check the sidebar for my up to the minute Flickr Feed.

A freelance photographer named Steve was taking pictures of a San Francisco MUNI station when he was stopped by MUNI officials, and BART Police officers.

They told him he was breaking a post 9-11 law forbidding anyone from taking photographs of the rail system.
Here's the thing, there is no such law.

They called the SFPD, who got pissed at Steve for not following an order to obey a law that doesn't exist. Even going so far as to say:

"Would it have been so difficult for you to just stop taking photographs when these guys told you to stop? If you weren't on your soapbox, I'd be out fighting real crime rather than standing around here dealing with you." He expounded further, "Even if there is no law forbidding photography in the MUNI System, the Fare Inspectors have the right to refuse you service for any reason they choose, including taking photographs."

Meaning, if you don't listen to the lying fake cops, who tell you to obey a law that doesn't exist, then they can MAKE UP any reason to have you arrested. (via boingboing)

WTF?
better yet... WHY?

The clunkyrobot takes a lot of photographs, that's why I carry this printable pdf of the photographer's rights. Here is also another printable flyer detailing your rights as an amateur or professional photographer. Also, do you take photos in the UK?

This is a story of clicking thru

I was messing around with my audioscrobbler feed. (audioscrobbler is a plugin for iTunes that tracks all the music I listen to and publishes it to a webpage... so you know, I can look at what I've been listening to... even though I probably remember listening to it... anyway technology is terrific) The website also gives you "neighbors." These are people whose musical tastes most closely resemble my own.

My closest musical neighbor is a guy who goes by Atommoore. (76% musical match) He has his weblog linked from his audioscrobbler page.

In his weblog he talks about seeing a show in NYC called The Midnight Pajama Jam.

Which struck me as kind of weird because we are working on a midnight show for Dad's Garage right now called The Saturday Morning Pajama Jam (that runs at midnight on Fridays... ). Although, Rene stole the name for our show from Kid n' Play, so I guess the odds of a similar sounding show aren't that slim.

Anyway the other Pajama Jam, the one in New York, it's hosted by Jon Benjamin and two puppets.

Who?

Jon Benjamin was the voice of Ben from Doctor Cats. He was the voice of Coach McGurk and Jason from Home Movies. And to a lessor extent a voice in Noggin's O'Grady High. (A cartoon the lady fell in love with, but I could not abide) The Midnight Pajama Jam website is filled with some interesting stuff. Like movies, and some animation. It's all funny, and Jon Benjamin's voice will make me laugh even if he's not saying something funny.

Now as for OUR Pajama Jam, well there will be more on that later, but I can tell you right now... we have more than two measly puppets... we have upwards of 6. Maybe more if we finish building them.

Let's just say that if you live in Atlanta, you should keep your friday schedules cleared, I'm talking the witching hour! So no crying about how you need to booze it up. Do it before the show, like a professional.

"I'll upset your balance m'Lord!"

First it was a cartoon phenomenon, then it was a side-scrolly flash game, later still it became a pixelated tribute to early RPG games, but now... now it's a Movie!
The Peasant's Quest movie trailer.
That's me behind that pig mask.
That's my friend Rene freaking out in the mud.

^yeah that was a stretch...

Hot on the heals of the critically acclaimed album by William "The Shat" Shattner Has Been, producer Ben Folds plans the release of his own new full length album: Songs For Silverman.

He's got a single out now called Landed. (itunes link)

The album is due out in April, but in the meantime, they are remastering the BF5 classic Whatever and Ever Amen. It's supposed to have 7 classic bonus tracks included for your re-purchasing platitude in March.

In his Feb 3rd journal entry David Byrne said this:

"The luxury goods market is like the art market. Stuff is only worth what someone will pay for it, It's value- whether it be a designer handbag or a Damien Hirst, has nothing to do with it's utility, the labor that went into making it or how well it is made."

This, in combination with the results of our art show has got me thinking a lot about the value we assign to the art we make. Pricing our stuff was a struggle for most of us. It all raised an important question.

Can art really be affordable?

The art we made had a lot of sweat poured into it. But it only cost around $25. Does that mean the buyer will value it less than that Ansel Adams reprint they had framed? Probably. Our art probably won't make the second apartment move without being discarded. But here is the kicker... that's OK!

I don't want my art to be worth what someone will pay for it. I want it to be worth a fair price. A fair return for effort. Leaving it up to "what someone will pay" is not appealing to me. But that is art, and art is life.

Here is a collection of 80's New York Subway Grafitti photographed by Martha Cooper. You can see more of Martha's photos on her website.

Some of those train car peices photographed by Cooper can also been seen in the great documentary about the big 80's grafitti blowup called Style Wars.

OK...

By Saturday afternoon we had all tucked away our pencils and brushes, or in Sharie's case, metal bending tools. And by 7:00pm that evening we had nailed all our stuff to the walls of Matt's basement.

By all accounts the show was a success. People came to see art, most of those people were our friends, but amazingly enough, some of them were not. Very awesome. Everything in the show had a price on it, and while making money wasn't really the point (most pieces averaged for about $25) putting affordable art into people's hands was. Every artist involved sold something, some people sold everything they made.

Matt's basement was perfect for a show our size. We filled it out nicely. In his backyard we had a small fire pit going. People were drawn to the fire, around it they would tell stories of adventure and art making.

I met a few people who have actually been to this website (thankyou!) and handed out as many stickers as I could remember to give out. We sold a couple of Art Show T-shirts, and people were asking about when the next show would be. That's about all we could ask for. Thanks to everyone who took the time to come out.

For posterity's sake, I've reproduced the three drawings I put in the show as desktops. In easy to digest thumbnail size.

Eatem' up yum:

work @ 1600 pixels wide
work @ 1200 pixels wide

dead @ 1600 pixels wide
dead @ 1200 pixels wide

synthetic @ 1600 pixels wide
synthetic @ 1200 pixels wide

Hello,

there has not been much here.
All energies focused on art show.

Documentation to follow soon. Will feature but not be limited to:
Photos, First Hand Accounts, Bought or Bartered Artwork, pithy T-Shirts, and a Sense of Accomplishment.

++ end transmission.